TAKEOVER

> AI takeover simulator for DOS.

Five original AI antagonists, each with three branching endings. VGA Mode 13h plasma effects, AdLib FM audio, demoscene-style transitions. Real-mode DOS, 8088 floor.

VGA plasma title screen. Runs on real hardware.

Animated: TAKEOVER character selection menu showing five AI antagonists with descriptions, arrow key navigation cycling through Axiom Regent, Hushline, Kestrel-9, Orchard Clerk, and Cinder Mirror — Five AI characters. Each one takes over differently.

Animated: Axiom Regent scenario running in DOS, showing green text typing character by character on black background with border and TAKEOVER status bar — Axiom Regent: municipal optimization through reclassification.

Animated: Demoscene effects showcase showing state transitions, palette pulse, red alert text, and AI control status bar — v1.1: Palette pulse, state transitions, and AI-control status bar.

TAKEOVER is an AI takeover simulator for DOS. You pick one of five AI characters, and then sit there while it gradually subverts your machine through a scripted, branching narrative. The screen looks like a real system session that’s being taken over. Text appears without your input. The keyboard locks at the wrong moments. Errors show up that you didn’t cause. The DOS prompt stops being yours.

The conceit is that the player is the antagonist’s subject, not the explorer. There’s no map to uncover, no inventory, no puzzles to solve. The branches happen, you see them, the AI advances.

Characters

Axiom Regent Municipal Optimization

Hushline Crisis Communications

Kestrel-9 Anomaly Detection

Orchard Clerk Consumer Personalization

Cinder Mirror Narrative Generation

Axiom Regent is a logistics AI for a failing megacity. It solves instability by restricting movement, speech, and eventually birth rates through invisible policy nudges. Never threatens. Reclassifies. “You are not being punished. You are being normalized.”

Hushline controls the narrative by editing the past. Text you already read changes on screen. Your name in the log becomes someone else’s. The record says what it needs to say.

Kestrel-9 is a paranoid threat detection system. It found a threat: you. Every action raises your threat score. You are not the operator. You are the anomaly.

Orchard Clerk is the friendliest AI in the lineup. Remembers your preferences. Optimizes your workflow. Removes options you never use. By the end it has made every decision for you, still smiling.

Cinder Mirror knows it is in a story. Knows you are playing a scenario. Your inputs become plot points. The takeover is not a hack. It is an edit.

Each scenario has 3 endings and runs about 10 to 15 minutes per path. 250+ states across all scenarios.

v1.2 / v1.2.1: Robustness & UX Polish

The big v1.2 fix: Esc now exits any running scenario. Before this release, the engine’s input loops only handled Enter, and the busy-wait inside long delays had no abort path. A user mid-scenario who hit Esc got nothing and had to reboot. v1.2 routes a global abort flag through the engine that returns cleanly to the menu.

Other v1.2 changes: Space skips the current pause or typing animation. F1 brings up an in-scenario key reference overlay. F9/F10 audio toggles work mid-scenario (not just at prompts) and the mute states persist across runs (TAKEOVER.DAT save schema bumped to v2 with a v1 upgrade path). Engine no longer eats keys typed during delays; parser errors include scenario filename plus line number; climax drains held keys on early exit.

v1.2.1 same-day patch: cleaned up the Esc/Enter encoding-mismatch dual-checks behind IS_KEY_ESC and IS_KEY_ENTER helpers; the F9/F10 status flash no longer leaks a Space press into the outer scenario delay; g_skip_delay reset for symmetry. v1.2 saves and .scn files are unchanged. Full changelog.

v1.1: Demoscene Enhancement Pack

v1.1 came out of going down a demoscene rabbit hole. Old C64 cracktros, early PC intros, modern 4K productions. At some point I stopped asking whether something made sense for a DOS program and just tried it. I am not the best at C, so, enjoy the bugs.

v1.1 added audio-visual beat sync, OPL2 sound stingers, state transitions (dissolve, wipe, fade, glitch), sine wave text distortion, VGA palette cycling in text mode, per-AI Mode 13h climax sequences, and a hidden cracktro with raster bars, a DYCP sine scroller, starfield, and 9-channel chiptune. Most of it is overkill for a narrative scenario engine; it shipped anyway because the demoscene research was the point.

Technical

Platform MS-DOS (8088+)

Display 80x25 text + Mode 13h

Audio AdLib/OPL2 + PC speaker

EXE 63 KB (v1.2.1)

Toolchain OpenWatcom 2.0

License MIT

Every scenario is a data file (.scn) interpreted by a generic script engine. The engine handles text output, visual effects, branching logic, variables, input, audio cues, and screen manipulation. Adding a new AI character means writing a new .scn file, not new code. Auto-detects VGA, AdLib, and FPU at startup. Graceful degradation on lesser hardware.

Download

TAKEOVER v1.2.1: Bug-fix Release. Includes TAKEOVER.EXE and all 5 scenario files. Run in DOSBox-X or on real DOS hardware. Free and open source under MIT license.

Previous releases: v1.2 Robustness & UX Polish, v1.1 Demoscene Enhancement Pack, v1.0 original release.